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Amprion Offshore has started working on an energy corridor project that would bring electricity produced by up to 8 GW of offshore wind farms in the North Sea directly to the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Named Windader West, the energy corridor involves building four offshore grid connection systems that would use the new-generation 2 GW offshore grid technology. Each of the four connections (NOR-15-1, NOR-17-1, NOR-19-1 and NOR-21-1) would have a transmission capacity of 2 GW and, together, the grid connections would transmit enough electricity to cover the energy needs of eight million households in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The subsea cables that run from the wind farms in the North Sea would be bundled underground from the landfall point to their grid connection points in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.
Amprion plans for the first 2 GW of offshore wind capacity to flow to North Rhine-Westphalia via a Windader West line in 2032. The remaining three lines would go into operation in 2033, 2034 and 2036.
“In order to bring the project into harmony with people, nature and the environment and to minimise on-site disturbances, the systems are largely installed in parallel”, said Eric Zieschang , the Windader West project manager.
Currently, the transmission system operator (TSO) is preparing the project for public consultation to provide comprehensive information to the public and stakeholders while the project is at an early stage of planning.
“Early involvement of all interest groups is particularly important to us. In this way, we can get in touch with the people on-site and gather important information that will help us with our planning” , said Linus Dahm , project spokesperson for the North Rhine-Westphalian part of the project.
“We will organise public information events in October. Among other things, our focus is on the first approval step, the so-called regional planning procedure”, said Stefan Sennekamp , project spokesperson for the Lower Saxony part of the Windader West project.
The start of the spatial planning process for the four offshore connections will start in September with the application conferences of the Düsseldorf district government (for North Rhine-Westphalia) and the Weser-Ems regional development office (for Lower Saxony). The documents for the Amprion procedure will not be submitted until next year and public participation will be carried out by the authorities.